Getting up from the Great Dane, she said, "I think you can. Oh, and plenty of copper-jacketed hollow-point ammunition."

Kipp grinned at me, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Tom, you must be planning a trip straight to h.e.l.l City."

"I'm hoping it's just a suburb, sir."

"Come along. I want you to meet Mazie and the family. Then we'll outfit you p.r.o.nto."

The sprawling house was furnished differently from what I had imagined and was much warmer and more welcoming than I expected. Intricate and beautifully worn Persian carpets on the hardwood floors. Antique j.a.panese cabinets. Pictorial j.a.panese screens on the walls. Shanghai Art Deco chairs and sofas upholstered in rich silks. Stained-gla.s.s and amber blown-gla.s.s lamps. And scattered here and there, large plush squeaky toys for a ginormous dog.

Later, Mrs. Fischer would tell me who Kipp and his family were and how they came to be in this place. As this is my memoir, however, I will use authorial license and insert that information throughout my account of events in Casa Bolthole, which is what they called their desert home.

Kipp had been a hugely successful equities trader in a major investment firm with a sterling reputation. The company had installed a new CEO, a man with deep investment-management background, who had also previously been a senator from a major Eastern-seaboard state before losing his re-election bid. In two years, the senator managed to bankrupt the firm with large reckless bets on foreign bonds and currencies. Even worse, a billion dollars of investors' money had gone missing, not lost in the bond or currency debacles-just gone. Because we live in a brave new world of financial buccaneering in which properly connected politicians, current and former, can steal from the public or private purse with little chance of punishment, the senator was not indicted, but Kipp was. The evidence, as well-concocted as any martini that might please James Bond, persuaded a jury to convict.

Before he had been an equities trader, Kipp had served as an intelligence officer in the marines. He knew a thing or two about surveillance, electronic eavesdropping, and cleverly structured entrapments of the enemy, as did a number of his former marine buddies, who came to his a.s.sistance. In a seemingly private venue, when the ex-senator thought he was in the company of a like-minded public servant with equally sticky fingers, after a couple of drinks too many, he gloated about the cleverness with which he had framed Kipp for the charge of embezzlement. A recording made without the knowledge of the subject cannot be easily entered into evidence in a court of law. But between Kipp's conviction and his sentencing, the ex-senator's gloating, with accompanying video, was put on YouTube by an anonymous and untraceable truth teller.

The judge declared a mistrial. The prosecutor dropped all charges. Then something else happened, something far worse, and at his wife's suggestion, Kipp agreed that henceforth they should live off the grid. Through false ident.i.ties and clandestine means, they constructed Casa Bolthole with a purpose in mind. To this day, the senator remains a free man, so lawyered-up that every time he goes to court, the tramping of attorneys' feet sounds like a Memorial Day parade from a lost time when uniformed servicemen and ribboned veterans marched by the thousands to honor their country and to be honored in return by crowds lining the parade route.

The kitchen in Casa Bolthole was large, with Santos mahogany flooring, golden bird's-eye-maple cabinetry that featured rounded corners as in a ship's galley, and black-granite countertops, all clean flowing lines that soothed the eye. At the round dining table, six places were set for dinner, and the flames of candles fluttered in crystal containers. The overhead lights had been dialed low, and more candles stood on the center island.

At that island, as we entered, Mazie finished pouring Dom Perignon into four champagne flutes. "None for you," she told Biggy as he hurried to her side, nostrils flaring, a potential four-legged alcoholic.

Tall, willowy, beautiful, her glossy black hair worn long, Mazie was wrapped in an elegant black-silk kimono patterned with white koi mottled red and red koi mottled gold. Her large almond-shaped eyes were so dark that, reflecting several points of candlelight, they might have been portals offering two views of a night sky and stars ever receding into eternity.

After more warm greetings and another introduction, we stood at the island and raised the slender gla.s.ses, and Mazie said, "To Oscar, in whom the fire and the rose are now one."

Mrs. Fischer and Kipp said, "To Oscar." I didn't have any idea what the toast meant, but I don't have any idea what a lot of things mean, so I said, "To Oscar," as well, and we sipped the champagne, which was icy cold and delicious.

Biggy padded to the corner of the kitchen in which his water bowl stood on a mat, and he noisily lapped at the contents, perhaps joining in a non-alcoholic toast, as if he were the designated driver.

After a second sip of Dom Perignon, Mazie turned to me and spoke as if she already knew what we'd come here to acquire and what task I had set out upon that would require those acquisitions. "Tom, if Tom is your truest name, are you afraid of the battle that lies ahead of you?"

Remembering what Annamaria had told me, I said, "Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid, but I hope only in proportion to the threat."

"I sense a terrible longing in you, a deep yearning. I hope you don't yearn for death."

"No, ma'am. I yearn for what comes after it. But I'm not keen on suffering."

"None of us are. But we suffer nonetheless. Until we reach that condition Oscar reached a few years ago."

"You mean ... fully blue and smooth?"

Mazie's smile was beatific, a curve of pure grace. She had an aura of perfect calm and great strength. Her uncommonly direct gaze suggested that she had once stared down Death himself and no longer feared what she might see in other eyes.

Later, I would learn from Mrs. Fischer that Mazie had been an attorney in a major Manhattan law firm when Kipp had been an equities trader. After the video of the senator had been posted on YouTube, clearing Kipp and implicating the former politician in the theft of investors' money, their wobbling world seemed to have been returned to its proper angle of rotation.

But then the worse thing happened. A senior partner in Mazie's firm introduced her to two new clients, Mr. Reasoner and Mr. Power, businessmen who had a complaint against a major compet.i.tor, involving patent infringement, which seemed an easy case for a litigator of her talents. Because the clients were wary to the point of paranoia, the first meeting with them took place in a soundproof conference room. After introductions but before the meeting began, the senior partner excused himself "for just a moment," without explanation. As Mr. Reasoner took a seat at the table and opened his briefcase, Mr. Power crossed the room to have a closer look at a bronze sculpture with which he professed to be quite taken, and as he pa.s.sed behind Mazie, she felt something sting the back of her neck.

When she regained consciousness, her wrists were bound to the arms of a chair. A rubber ball had been placed in her mouth, and her lips had been firmly sealed with duct tape. For a grueling hour, the two men discussed in loving detail their favorite methods of torture, and while they talked, they took turns pinching shut her nose, inducing suffocation panic before letting her breathe again. They made certain she understood that if she wasn't safe in the luxurious offices of this prestigious law firm, she would be safe nowhere. If she couldn't trust a senior partner-or perhaps any senior partner, or anyone at all-in the firm where she had worked for eleven years, she could trust no one anywhere.

This was payback, they said, for what Kipp did to the senator, who still had more loyal and powerful friends than could be easily counted. Kipp was innocent, yes, but that didn't matter. The only purpose of the innocent was to be used, like cattle, by those who despised innocence. Oh, maybe the meek will inherit the earth, but not now, not until the end of time. Now the meek, the innocent, had to learn to take what was dealt to them and endure it.

Reasoner and Power, obviously not their names, said they would not mark her this time, because the punishment that she and Kipp had earned wasn't to be administered in a single visit. Days or weeks, perhaps even months from now, they would surprise her again, four of them instead of two, and they would brutally rape her until they were satiated. After that, they might give her several months, maybe a full year, in which to antic.i.p.ate their third visit. No one can be vigilant 24/7 for an extended period of time, and no bodyguards she might hire could be trusted, because the majority of people were easily corrupted. On their third visit, they would torture her, blind her, visit upon her a measure of brain damage that would ensure her permanent disability, but they would not kill her. Kipp's punishment was to bear the guilt that would only grow as he saw her emotionally, physically, and intellectually degraded.

Finished with her, they took the duct tape off her mouth, untied her wrists from the arms of the chair, and allowed her to remove the rubber ball from her mouth. Reasoner placed the ball, the tape, and the cord in his briefcase. The two men said, "Have a nice day," and left the conference room. Mazie remained seated for several minutes, telling herself that she was waiting for the senior partner to return and babble out some excuse, perhaps tearfully, about why he had been unable to warn or to protect her. The truth was, she felt too weak to stand. She would never be given an excuse. She was done here. They would already have some reason for firing her, supported by reams of forged doc.u.mentation. The firm occupied Floors 34 through 37, and when at last Mazie left that conference room, she found the entire thirty-sixth floor deserted. The hush was so eerie that it would not have been hard to believe that the city in all its boroughs had been depopulated. But when the elevator doors opened at the lobby, the bustle and bark of humanity returned, and she had to pa.s.s through it. In the street, the braying of car horns and engines and brakes and people overwhelmed her, oppressed her.

For a while, she leaned on a lamppost, head hung, expecting to vomit in the gutter. When she didn't, she went home to Kipp. They had significant financial resources, in fact millions, and the expertise to move them around often enough and cleverly enough to leave a trail that eventually withered away. They made plans that very afternoon, not merely plans to vanish into new ident.i.ties and hide, although that was part of it, but also to fight back, and not merely against the senator and Mazie's former law firm but, wherever an opportunity presented itself, against any aspect of the vigorously metastasizing corruption that was a terminal cancer in this ever more dangerous postmodern world.

While waiting to vomit in the gutter, Mazie had recalled lines from her favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, who wrote that although the world ceaselessly turned and changed, one thing and one alone never changed. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: / The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil. Their plan seemed grandiose, foolish, hopeless, but step by step, as they worked to fulfill it, they found the surest footing they'd ever known. If they had elected merely to change ident.i.ties and hide, they would have had no hope of full and meaningful lives, because those who cower forget how to stand and, in time, can only crawl. By choosing the path of resistance, they had discovered people like Mrs. Fischer and Oscar, like Gideon and Chandelle, and they had learned the true and hidden nature of the world.

In the candlelit kitchen, Mazie topped off the four gla.s.ses of champagne, and we carried them downstairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt, Big Dog in the lead.

This subterranean level, as large as the main floor, was the heart of their campaign of principled resistance. A wide corridor offered rooms to the front of the house on the left, to the back of the house on the right. We were headed to the armory, but first we stopped at a chamber on the left that was occupied by four computer workstations, racks of servers, and all manner of other electronics that I didn't recognize. For all I knew, the young couple currently laboring there might be hacking the CIA or in communication with extraterrestrials in an orbiting mother ship, or playing video games.

The man, in his late twenties, was Leander, Kipp and Mazie's son. He had one of his father's green eyes, having lost the other one during a tour of duty, as a marine, in Afghanistan, a year before his father crossed the senator. Leander had two-thirds of his dad's winning smile, the last third having been twisted by the scar tissue that disfigured the left side of his face. His wife, Harmony, was as cute as Goldie Hawn in her prime, looked fit and tough enough to win an iron-man contest, and spoke with a Georgia drawl.

As we shook hands, Harmony asked, "Where do I know you from?"

"I'm sure we've never met, ma'am."

"Maybe, but I've seen you. I have an honest-to-G.o.d spooky memory for faces," she declared.

"Well, I do have a spooky face."

"Yeah, right. About as spooky as any guy in a crazy-popular boy band. I'll remember you before you leave, pilgrim."

"Boy band?" I grimaced. "That's a low blow."

The next big room on the left contained an impressive array of printing presses, scanners, laminators, engraving machines, and other equipment used to forge doc.u.ments. This appeared to be the domain of Tracker and his second wife, Justine. Leander's identical twin, Tracker had served in Iraq but had returned without wounds. On his first day back, however, he walked in on his wife, Karen, in bed with two men, and twenty-four hours later, he filed for divorce. He had struck gold the second time, not just because of how Justine looked, which was really fine, but also because she radiated intelligence as surely as a lamp gave off light.

Farther along the hall and on the right, we came to the largest chamber in the bas.e.m.e.nt, the armory, which contained more weapons and ammunition than the average gun shop, even more than the average rap star's recreation room. Kipp and Mazie set to work fulfilling our order, and Mrs. Fischer a.s.sisted, seemingly as familiar with their stock as they were.

Big Dog padded up and down the aisles between tall metal shelves of inventory, sniffing with apparent approval. After all, in addition to being a pet, he was also a guard dog, and he appreciated the need for a strong defense.

At one point, as he was showing me the pair of Glock pistols he thought best for relatively in-close work, Kipp must have detected my antipathy to guns. He said, "We have no choice, Tom. The world is going mad, overseas and here. Year by year, the government ever more aggressively militarizes state and local police forces and even its most seemingly benign agencies. In August of last year, the Social Security Administration purchased one hundred seventy-four thousand rounds of hollow-point ammunition for distribution to forty-one of its offices around the country. They must expect Grandpa and Granny to get really p.i.s.sed about something the SSA intends to do. The Environmental Protection Agency, too. And Homeland Security ordered seven hundred and fifty million rounds in various calibers last August. Now, either they expect a h.e.l.l of a lot of terrorist attacks or a civil war, and no matter whether the enemy is shouting 'Allahu Akbar' or 'G.o.d bless America,' they must figure they'll have to kill a lot of people."

I stared at him, speechless. His grin was as winning as ever. Finally, I said, "You're a scary guy."

"Good. It's a scary world. You do know guns, don't you?"

"I have some experience of them, sir."

Leander appeared in the doorway to the hall and said, "Mom, Harmony wants to talk to you about something."

After Mazie left, Kipp finished putting everything together and stuffed it into a gunnysack with a drawstring top. Mrs. Fischer paid him, and all of us followed Biggy into the hallway.

Mazie and Harmony were waiting for me. They had a printout of a newspaper story about the mall shootings in Pico Mundo nineteen months earlier. My high-school yearbook picture was featured under a headline that claimed too much credit for me.

"I knew I'd seen your face," Harmony said. "I'm sorry I said the boy-band thing. You're no boy-band phony."

"I'm not what that paper calls me, either."

"Once a decade or so," she said, "the newspaper gets something right, and I think they did this time."

Mazie said, "If you understand the true and hidden nature of the world, you know that even the smallest details are of profound importance. Like a silly nickname. You're not Thomas as in Tom. Odd Thomas. Odd doesn't mean curious or peculiar or eccentric. Something is odd when it can't be matched, when it's singular, alone of its kind."

"Please, ma'am," I objected. "My name is nothing but my name. In a drawer of mismatched socks, every one of them is odd. Nothing glorious about that. A mistake on the birth certificate left the T off Todd."

Here came again that smile of pure grace. "Nothing so mundane as that. At your birth it was known what name best suited you, and if your parents had wished to name you Bob, the certificate would nevertheless have shown you to be Odd."

Her eyes were night sky again, so dark but full of the infinite possibilities to which the stars bear witness, and I didn't know what to say to her.

She said, "May I touch your heart, Odd Thomas?"

Uncertain of her meaning, I said, "Ma'am?"

She put her right hand flat to my breast. Nothing in her gesture was forward or improper, but tender and loving to such an extent that she almost brought tears to my eyes.

"Women are drawn to you, Odd, not as they may be drawn to other men. I'm sure that your life is full of women who are drawn to you. Because they know or sense that you take a vow seriously, that you're faithful forever, that you recognize and cherish in good women what qualities you loved in the one you lost, that you respect them, that you care deeply about their dignity perhaps even when they don't, that you will never walk away from one in need."

I couldn't let her think of me in such elevated terms, for the truth was not so defined by chivalry as she imagined. I could barely summon enough power of voice to reveal that truth in a whisper: "Ma'am, I've killed two women. Shot them to death."

Perhaps she was by nature a romantic, or more sentimental than she seemed, because my words had no effect on her smile. "If you killed them, they were murderers who had murdered before and would have murdered you."

"I shot them, ma'am. The circ.u.mstances don't change that fact. I shot them."

Mazie took one of my hands in both of hers. "Believe me, when your time comes, it will be women who hold you and comfort you during your last moments in this world, who carry you into the next, and who greet you there."

Mazie kissed me on the forehead, as if bestowing a benediction, and I said, "I have done terrible things." Harmony took my hand that her mother-in-law relinquished, her touch another tender benediction, and I said, "I'll do terrible things again." Justine put one hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek in what I at once recognized as the way that I had sometimes kissed the urn containing my Stormy's ashes.

Their reverence was too much for me, to be mistaken for the man that I might want to be but am not, to be thought brave for only going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. I was no less uncertain and unsteady than anyone else in this broken world, often a fumbler and a fool, with more failures than successes. These were good women, good people, and their kindness consoled me. I could never fulfill such lofty expectations, however, and a quiet yet compelling embarra.s.sment drove me to leave as politely and as quickly as possible.

The limousine waited under the portico.

With Big Dog scowling at the surrounding night to ward off any man or animal with ill intentions, Kipp stowed our purchases in the pa.s.senger compartment.

Beyond the overhang, rain chased past the house at an extreme angle in an escalating wind.

Mrs. Fischer drove, and I rode in the front pa.s.senger seat, the face of the rhinestone cowboy in my mind's eye.

Twenty-three.

WE RODE IN SILENCE ALONG THE SHALE-AND SNAKE-LESS-track, the length of the gravel lane, and across the potholed blacktop to the interstate, where Mrs. Fischer turned east once more, continuing our interrupted pursuit of the missing children and the men who had taken them.

A sense of duty was as real to me as the pounding rain, and I felt that I might drown in it as easily as in a flash flood. Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool. I wasn't burdened by a fear of death but instead by a fear of failure. If there were seventeen hostages and I rescued even sixteen, the one lost would be too sharp a reminder of another loss, nineteen months earlier, in the mall in Pico Mundo. I wished-and more than wished-that this responsibility might be lifted from me, but I knew that it would not be lifted.

I believe that Mrs. Fischer gave me the gift of silence because she knew that I had left Casa Bolthole in a state of embarra.s.sment, that I felt inadequate to the challenges of my strange life, and that the more anyone told me that I was equal to those challenges, the more I would feel that I was not. The greatest danger, of course, was to believe that I was equal to them, because a.s.surance can morph into arrogance that Death loves to prove unfounded.

The broad highway led east-northeast, and mile by mile, I felt more strongly the black-hole gravity of the cowboy.

a.s.sociating with bad men, even for the purpose of defeating them, can make you vulnerable to the allure of evil. A sense of duty can be corrupted into self-righteousness, which can inspire a self-exemption from all laws, an embrace of power and the will to use it ruthlessly. Power is the central promise of evil, the dark light of that lamp, because nothing extinguishes the soul more quickly than pride in power.

Mazie's approval had seemed close to veneration. To endure such extreme praise was dangerous enough. If I came to believe that I had earned it, I would lose everything that mattered.

I was only a fry-cook with paranormal abilities that were not a blessing but a weight to carry. And considering that I had no job, I couldn't claim to be even a fry-cook, but simply a man with a burden, which was one of the most common creatures on the earth.

The rain fell in torrents sufficient to float an ark. The world condensed into a highway that, for all I could see beyond it, might have ribboned through a void as deep as interstellar s.p.a.ce.

We were racing so fast that the cataracts of rain crashing into the windshield were all but blinding, and yet Mrs. Fischer appeared confident about her ability to control the limo under these or any conditions. Humming one tune or another, each of them cheery, my elderly guide, the spiritual daughter of Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans and the bride of Tonto, was clearly unconcerned about the poor visibility, as though she-or the vehicle itself-could see for miles ahead in these or even worse conditions. I decided not to look at the speedometer.

Finally I said, "What amazing thing did Gideon and Chandelle do in Pennsylvania last December?"

After a hesitation, she said, "You're only just coming into an awareness that you're not alone, Oddie. It's best to ease into a full understanding of the resistance."

"Resistance? Sounds too political for me."

"It's not political in the least, child. It's been going on through all the ages and all the countries of the world, no matter who the ruler is-prime minister, king, emperor, dictator, mullah. Our adversaries exist in every profession, every race, every ethnicity, every cla.s.s, every political faction-but our friends abide also in all those places."

She looked away from the interstate and smiled. Her brooch, the jeweled exclamation point, sparkled in the dashboard glow.

I asked, "Why is it best to ease into an understanding?"

Returning her attention to the highway, she said, "It's best because you need to be able to cope with your fear, which will be perhaps too great to bear if you're abruptly plunged into the full truth. In the thrall of absolute terror, you're less likely to survive what's coming in the hours ahead. Trust me, dear. Take this discovery moment by moment, event by event, allowing fear to increase at the same pace as your understanding. Then you'll grow into your fear and be able to function with it."

Earlier, I had thought that she seemed like the mother of Yoda, the pint-size sage from the Star Wars movies. Now she almost sounded like him, except that her syntax was correct.

The rain began to relent somewhat, and I suspected that we might be outrunning the storm once more.

Although the downpour still obscured much of the night here in the emptiness of the Mojave, I saw the sign welcoming us to Nevada, which we flew past as if we were degenerate gamblers desperate for the games of Las Vegas.

We drove steadily farther away from Pico Mundo, and yet I sensed that somehow I was coming full circle to it, that when I stood before the cowboy, I would discover some unfinished business with which I thought I had dealt in my hometown long before I'd left there. The adventures of which I'd written in multiple volumes of memoirs were in fact a single adventure, during which my understanding of reality evolved until now I seemed to be drawing steadily closer to what Annamaria-and later Mazie-called "the true and hidden nature of the world," which Mrs. Fischer warned would give new meaning to the word terror.

Miles later, when again we had driven out of the rain, the glow of Vegas was a sullen fan-shaped beacon on the horizon, a scene like you might see on a poster for a science-fiction movie: lonely highway dwindling toward the eerie light of some interstellar vessel come down to Earth and waiting just beyond the next hill to fill your soul with wonder. But this glow was only Las Vegas, about which there was nothing transcendent, unless your idea of transcendence was topless dancers, a show by Blue Man Group, a run of luck at the blackjack tables, an abundance of free drinks culminating in a system-purging puke, unconsciousness, and a hangover in the brain-searing morning light of the desert.

Suddenly, in my mind's eye, the image of the rhinestone cowboy grew brighter, more detailed.

"Next exit, ma'am," I said. "North."

The ramp led to a two-lane blacktop state route that took us past an array of unidentified large buildings that might have been warehouses, considering that many national companies distributed their products out of Nevada because it had no inventory tax. We pa.s.sed a few modest cl.u.s.tered houses, then a few more a.s.sorted isolated structures, and a roadside business whose owner called it JEB'S TRADING POST, which included gasoline pumps.

Soon the road rose through rolling hills of desert brush and colonies of pampas gra.s.s with tall pale plumes, and then climbed at a steeper angle than before. The spectacle of Las Vegas lights, still miles away and not directly visible, refracting through the moisture-laden low clouds, fading with the distance from the source, paled the sky just enough to silhouette the mountains ahead of us.